You get sent a photo and/or web link to a video of your car and the infraction as it occured - you watch yourself driving through a red light. If it doesn’t show on-camera, there’s no verification of an offense, so no ticket.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case - even if the yellow is shorter than it should be, it’s still possible that most of the drivers legit ran the red light. Not every one who runs a red light does it exactly when the light it turning from yellow to red *- and even some of those people sped up to try to make it on the yellow, in which case I really wouldn’t consider them not guilty.
*They might run it when it’s been red for “too long” (not broken, just a long light) and there’s no cross traffic or traffic might be backed up so badly they can’t fully get through the intersection and are are still there when the light turns red , which in some places can result in a red light camera ticket .
You’re missing my point, I personally witnessed the camera flash going off inappropriately many times. Don’t know if it took a photo or just the flash was going off, don’t know if someone looked at those & said they were BS & didn’t send anything to the car’s owner but the repeated appearance of a defective system certainly made me question whether it was working right at all.
It is known that some of the contracts are written such that the company who owns/runs the cameras get a cut for every ticket. It has also been shown that some of the yellows are ‘short’ & not at the legal requirement for that light & that speed limit (I believe that the length of the yellow goes up with speed limit) & that by shorting it, even ¼ of a second they were gaming the system to make them more money.
I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m disagreeing with the idea that the manipulation necesarily implies that the majority of tickets are in that category. Let’s say for example, that the yellow should be 4 seconds and instead it is 3.5 seconds. There’s no way to tell whether the majority of red light tickets occur in that .5 seconds or in the rest of the time the light is red (like the .5 seconds before it turns green)
But if they can’t tell if you went thru the light at 3.7 seconds (shouldn’t have a ticket issued) or 7.3 seconds (should have had a ticket issued) then they need to throw them all out if the requirement was 4 seconds.
There are studies that show that, while they decrease T-bone accidents, they increase rear end collisions.
I’m only disagreeing with this -
Even if they can’t tell exactly when the car went through the red light ( and maybe they can - in my city the ticket shows how long the light was red) and should throw them all out - that doesn’t mean the majority of people really weren’t guilty. It might mean they can’t prove someone was guilty, but that’s not the same thing.
My point is it’s irrelevant. A ticket comes with a photo on it if you running a red light. If you don’t run an actual red light, then you can’t receive a photo of your car running a red light. So no ticket.
I suppose the question is this.
Do they actually filter out the ones with the car not doing something illegal, or do they send out the citation and expect that most people will pay it as the path of least resistance?
Said another way …
If it comes with a photo of your car doing something, and the entire downstream process has a de facto presumption of guilt, then are they expecting the citizen to contest the BS tickets they issue rather than them carefully diligently filtering out the BS pix before they write and send the citation?
Surely the answer is different in every jurisdiction in the land. But some of those are downright evil.
Story time:
You all might recall the riots in Ferguson MO, a suburb of St. Louis. Which were driven mostly from long-term festering resentment over heavy handed policing. The triggering event was certainly fuzzier as to who was in the wrong, but nevertheless the long-simmering pot boiled over.
For historical reasons that are mostly innocent, that general region of the metro area is composed of lots of teeny suburban municipalities with 10-person police departments and 2-judge courts.
A different nearby suburb, Blackjack, had a scam going that eventually the FBI busted. The MO state investigative bureau would not touch it with a 10-foot pole. Police had a remote control device that would switch a particular traffic light on a boulevard from yellow to red at a button push. And there they sat, watching cars approach the light, push the button, and create a red-light run which the camera duly and incontrovertibly recorded. Most of the city’s revenue budget came from those tickets. The residents were literally prisoners of the local police and their magic evidence-creating button.
…then it shouldn’t take a picture in the first place. If it’s regularly taking a picture while the light is green or when there isn’t a car in the intersection then clearly there’s something not working right. If by casual observation I can tell something isn’t right then I wouldn’t trust that any tickets they sent were accurate. If there was a human reviewing them & they saw so many taken inappropriately (over a period of months) then isnt it logical to for them to say these (multiple) cameras need to be fixed so I can stop wasting so much of my time?
I never got one & the county shut them down so it’s a moot point now.
I’ve read that the cameras periodically take photos for calibration purposes. You’ve never gotten a ticket there.
If you’re concerned, why not call and ask what’s up?
they’re no longer active